Has the scene died?

Hey everyone, I quit devving malware fully back in 2011 or so, and since then have had a proper job in software development making a great living. It's interesting to look back at things I made, and see how much I really didn't know. I don't code malware anymore, but I always have urges every once and a while, because my programming skills now have another 10 years of experience stacked on since I originally started.

I checked around and basically every site that was popular back in the day is down, and gone. This is really the only site to still remain up. Even HackForums seems to be dying pretty hard, there's nothing but useless random shit for sale in their marketplace (lets be honest, the only good thing about HF was selling shit to kids for money). No traces of any malware being sold there really.

Is the entire scene dead and gone? Or has everyone just moved to different sites now? There doesn't seem to be any new malware of any degree being programmed now.. no RATs, keyloggers, downloaders, crypters, etc.

There is also no reason to really spend time creating new tools if no one will buy them anyhow, and I'm sure as hell not going to infect people myself and steal passwords etc, as I've got a fantastic life right now, legally, making great money. I'd love to program some malware again, for educational purposes of course .

Either quit īcause of age, job, family etc or gone into small private crews.

As for new malware:
For example I dont think Iīve seen any banking bot which wasnīt a huge rip off zeus ever since its source leaked.
So the good stuff is kept to oneself and shit is sold.
But just my opinion.

It also seems the goals have changed, today its only about $$$.
So if you canīt make good money from it, why bother do it.

I'd love to program some malware again, for educational purposes of course .

Me too haha i would like to learn more about "malware coders world" (its beautiful ), but i know only java, a litte about python and i'm studying C++ (to aprimorate my reverse engineering skills). Java is nice to do basic functions like downloader, send some informations to C2, manipulate WMI...